even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

Rich person airing her drama in the paper of record = agonies

i’m being told this is a ‘humor piece’ in ‘the vein of david sedaris’

it’s not very ‘funny’ tho, is it

Neither is David Sedaris.

in her 20s she wrote the daily suck.com columns iirc

David Sedaris ime is a skillful writer and usually pretty successful at couching any stinging or mocking criticism of his family and partner in well-articulated and convincing affection for them (or at least he used to be… he’s sort of drowned in his own quiddities in the past couple decades). This woman is just bitter, cruel and playing out her family dysfunction in the most public forum

That piece was so assholish it made me reconsider stuff she'd written in the past that I'd liked.

That husband is currently writing a responsive piece for submission to the Times with the working headline “I Hate My Wife, As Well”

— Patrick Monahan (@pattymo) December 28, 2021

tbf, i kind of hate her husband too

*bites nails* can't wait for the follow up, definitely going to subscribe to read it

I don't know. As long-time married guy, I thought the "I Hate My Husband" piece was kind of funny. YMMV

yeah it all seems incredibly par for the course? like if a standup did a set of this material nobody would blink. which maybe says something about the relative levels of interpersonal intolerance in standup comedy idk.

like if a standup did a set of this material nobody would blink.

In 1995, maybe.

Mrs. Borat voice “Mai husbaaaand”

lmao

"Foreskin like wizard cowl..."

https://defector.com/maybe-your-marriage-just-sucks ($)

I wonder if any of us here have been married for 15 years

I have!

28 years here.

I channel all my hate into ILX threads

"You're welcome, Mrs. eephus" -- the Dave Matthews Band

28 years here.

14 years

I didn't really care for the Havrilesky piece, but some of the reaction to it seems not to have noticed that it's an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir. It's not like she suddenly got exasperated with her husband one day and ran to the New York Times to badmouth him.

coming up on 20 years

I'm sure my wife and I could each write a list of minor annoyances about one another that we overlook because, on balance, it's a good marriage. If plucked out of the context of the larger discussion, that list would look similar.

I wonder if any of us here have been married for 15 years

28 years this past June.

I didn't really care for the Havrilesky piece, but some of the reaction to it seems not to have noticed that it's an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir. It's not like she suddenly got exasperated with her husband one day and ran to the New York Times to badmouth him.

No, but that was the excerpt she chose to publish in the New York Times, removing it from any other context (because a lot of people aren't gonna realize it's an excerpt from a book and most of the people who read it are not gonna read the whole book, since it's a very bad piece of writing that does not do much to promote the larger project).

if i had to choose between the havrilesky piece and the i-love-my-wife defector piece mookie linked i would first of all wonder what pass my life had come to but anyway i think i hate the latter more actually

Tracer OTM with respect to this Lady and the Tiger dilemma we are confronted with here.

idk, i didn't love the parts of the defector piece where he was describing his own marriage - a little too hyperbolic - but on sum i hew closer to that experience than the havrilesky one by a long shot. and i thought his takedown of the havrilesky was otm

married 12 yrs here btw, together for ~17

Married 19 years, one thing that helps preserve a matrimonial union is to avoid reading marriage-themed clickbait.

I read my wife some of the lines from the Havrilesky piece and we both chuckled about it, especially the part about the sneeze/scream that she never hears without saying "Jesus Christ!".

My wife and I were just laughing about that piece, but more for its lack of full self awareness (although a few of the lines were funny), like as though the writer imagined she were just writing "don't you hate how men leave the toilet seat up," while basically calling her husband a disgusting piece of shit that she couldn't stand other than in rare moments where she was able to pretend he was something good.

wb

: )

Just had a heated discussion with Mrs. Redd when I told her I prefer various other approaches to the term and idea of a New Year's Resolution. Wonder if "humorous" Op-Ed should be written about this.

My latest rage-inducer from the times was the article about disgust that started off with a shockingly ableist anecdote about how disgusting people with colostomy bags are, so disgusting that they couldn't be worth dating. The article then went on to talk about how eating food with hands was disgusting...without even mentioning that people eat food with their hands in pretty much every culture on the planet, but particularly in African and Asian cultures.

Just an abysmal paper, I think I'm going to end my sub this year because of that article, to be frank.

It's amazing what a high percentage of The Paper of Record is either middlebrow fluff or just straight up trash. I barely read it anymore.

It seems like they need to fill a quota of content

Yeah that fucking article, I've been in a rage about it since it came out. Just an absolute disgrace.

i've probably said this before but aside from the international news and a few well reported metro stories it's completed its transformation into the New York Observer

They WISH. The New York Observer in its glory days crushes any current newspaper like a grape.

Lol okay yes that’s true, for one thing it’s not nearly spiteful enough. but you know what I mean.. the obsession with real estate, the narrow-band audience profile.. interpellating us all as the over-it nouveau riche

"the narrow-band audience profile"

vs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/ben-smith-new-york-times.html

“There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,” Ben Smith said. “That’s who we see as our audience.”

the observer really had some great, fun writing too it should be said. yeah maybe not a great comparison actually xpost

I still don't get that Ben Smith quote but if he's really saying "I have hired the best journalists in India and we're going to develop an amazing media property there with worldwide reach" more power to him I guess

‘Nothing Will Be the Same’: A Prison Town Weighs a Future Without a Prison
After a decade of efforts that reduced inmate populations, California is closing prisons. A town whose economy is built on incarceration wants to keep one open.

economy is built on incarceration

It's going to be the new "mines/factories/etc" closing for a lot of rural America, particularly as many places— even conservative areas— reevaluate mass incarceration, or at least strive to make it more streamlined.

For years, rural towns with little to no industrial base, aging populations, and a mostly aged agricultural and extractive economy in California have relied on prisons to survive, even when evidence shows that many of the jobs in new prisons go to people already working in prisons. That is, there is no meaningful employment gain when a new prison is built, though there is a net benefit to other area businesses. There is vast collusion between prison companies, guard unions, the state, and local civics orgs to bring prisons to small, struggling areas, fill those prisons with people from coastal cities, and talk about a revived economy, when really the logic is more akin to hedging one's bets on a monocrop, except the crop is human beings. Eventually, the system will collapse, and the whole reason for the town's existence will be shattered.

Just another reason to be against prisons.

There's a fair amount about the prisons in Susanville in Ruth Gilmore Wilson's 'The Golden Gulag,' which I highly, highly recommend to anyone who wants a radical and truly mind-bending look into the California incarceration complex and its culture.

I will say that I have driven through, and it is really a small, one-street town nestled in the foothills of the northern Sierra. Beautiful and old and sort of charming, despite the honky death cult vibes. There's a brewery that makes a great double IPA up there that hasn't found distribution outside of Northern California, I think about that beer all the time because I used to be able to buy a 24oz bottle of it for $3.50 and feel pretty loaded.